On the outskirts of Dubai, a shimmering metropolis built on buried oil, lies a small but similarly suave community looking at a new way of doing things. It is no small irony that the world’s most brazen exemplar of fossil-fueled excess is also home to a cutting-edge example of more thoughtful modern living. But the carefully planned Dubai Sustainable City […]

The United States docks in at the No. 1 spot for most wasteful countries in the world. Perhaps the US tradition of consumerism has something to do with this, especially during the holidays. After all, the US produces 236 million tons of waste per year, 25 million tons of which solely accumulates between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. The good news […]

Researchers at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey have come up with an unexpected way to produce electricity without using fossil fuels: A mushroom covered with bacteria. The “bionic mushroom” was announced in the journal Nano Letters and has captured the imagination of the public due to its wacky creativity. Bacteria have been of interest to energy researchers […]

While most families gather around the dinner table this time of year to eat turkey and give thanks, a team of scientists are doing something a little different with the bird — they’re turning its poop into fuel. NPR reports a team at Ben-Gurion University in Israel has been working to figure out ways to transform waste to resources, and […]

In many New Hampshire towns, residents pay a premium for their waste. Since the 1990s, the state has embraced “pay-as-you-throw” trash programs, which charge locals $1-2 for their trash bags. The bags come in different sizes, but they are the only bags the garbage haulers will collect, so they naturally encourage residents to waste less. The state capital of Concord […]

Cities along the coast have typically relied on sea walls to keep the ocean out. These concrete and steel embankments mitigate flooding when storms whip the waters onto land, and they currently protect the residents of countless ocean-adjacent towns. But according to Stateline, U.S. city leaders are reconsidering their flood defenses. Instead of sea walls, they’re increasingly opting for waterfront […]

After more than three decades maintaining and upgrading Michigan’s transportation systems, the state’s former head of transportation division (Michigan Department of Transportation, or MDOT), Kirk Steudle, has seen it all. Working with partners, big and small, and tackling problems, also big and small, Steudle has been on the front lines of smart city dreams and disappointments — not to mention […]

Over the last few years, we’ve been keeping tabs on a cooling systemdeveloped by a team led by Professor Shanhui Fan at Stanford University that draws thermal heat from a building and beams it into space through a process called radiative cooling – all without requiring any external power source. Now the researchers have paired this technology with a solar […]

What do you get when you mix human urine, loose sand, and bacteria? The answer is urine-based bio-bricks: A more environmentally friendly substitute for kiln-fired bricks, according to researchers at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Civil engineering master’s degree student Suzanne Lambert recently unveiled the newly formulated bricks. Similar to seashell formation, the bio-bricks result from a process called microbial […]

When Meg Daly broke both her arms in an accident four years ago, she put her car keys away and started using the Miami Metrorail. She quickly noticed how much space was not being utilized under the elevated train tracks and from there an idea was born. Daly founded Friends of The Underline with the goal to reinvent the 10-mile […]